Songfacts®:

• This is the title track to Rebecca Angel's first album. Produced by Jason Miles, it has a modern jazz feel, with a mix of standards and original songs. This one she worked on with her father, the trumpet player Dennis Angel.
• Angel shared the story behind the song in a Songfacts interview: "'What We Had' is a song about lost love and reminiscent of happier times. My father Dennis came up with the melody and I wrote the lyrics along with Jonah Prendergast. When my father sent me this new melody he wrote, I was on a 3-month long road trip across the United States. At first I had a hard time thinking of words that fit, or a story that made sense, so I decided to put the song aside until I returned home to New York in the mid- fall. Once I returned home, all I kept thinking about was this amazing adventure I had just been on, from driving down Highway 1, camping in forests, watching the crashing waves in Malibu at sunset and just living a care-free life.
  
  The weather when returning home was grey, cold and miserable and it made me quite sad. The lyrics of the song just flew out of me once I was back without having to try too hard. The story came from a real and authentic place about remembering better times."